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  Chapter 19

  The noise was incredible, a hundred times worse than taking off in a rocket. It tore through Philippe’s very being, rattling his eye sockets. The monitors on the walls showed the massive beam of fire in the instant before it hit the Cyclopes ship.

  Philippe felt his stomach twist as a cold sensation traveled up through his body, making his teeth chatter and his hands shake. Get away, he thought.

  But they could not. The fire engulfed the Cyclopes ship, the tow-pods, and the filigree, destroying all in an instant.

  “Keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going,” said Shanti, steadily.

  “Continue. The chosen one says to continue and to continue,” Max translated.

  The river of flame flowed through what now appeared to be empty space. What in God’s name does she want? Philippe wondered.

  As though in answer, a bright explosion of violet light emerged from the center of the flames.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire! We did it!” Shanti yelled.

  “She says to end the flames; we have accomplished our purpose,” said Max.

  The beam ceased, revealing a violet corona around where the explosion had been.

  “Yeah,” said Shanti with a smile. “There you are, motherfucker.”

  Max wisely chose not to attempt translation. Just then, a Host soldier ran in holding the portable translation device. I guess we left that in the conference room, Philippe thought.

  “Is it done?” asked George.

  “I think so,” said Shanti.

  George scowled at the screens. “It doesn’t look any different. That light should be straddling the portal, right? But it’s all on this side.”

  “It’s just light,” Shanti replied. “It’s OK, it isn’t matter.”

  George looked incredulous. “But there has to be something giving off that light, right?”

  Shanti gave a brief bark of laughter. “Try not to worry about it. See there, I think that’s a message probe going to get help. When it—shit!”

  “Oh, goody, more surprises,” said George.

  The satellite had collided with something that was coming through the portal from the other side—something very big and very dark. It glistened in the sunlight like polished onyx. It didn’t seem to have a definite shape, instead extruding itself through the portal like paste from a tube.

  The tactical room was completely silent for a moment. Even the ships near the portal seemed to stop in wonder. A rainbow of colors flashed in the depths of the dark, semi-transparent body as it flowed out of the portal.

  A Cyclopes ship, which had been attempting a rescue of its captured brethren, was the first to react, zipping around the momentarily flabbergasted Host ships and shooting a missile at the new threat.

  The missile struck the front end of the visitor, burrowing in and exploding. A chunk was blown off and began to drift toward the Cyclopes ship. As it traveled, the chunk dissolved into a dark mist. The mist quickly caught up to the Cyclopes ship and surrounded it in a sooty cloud. Then the cloud contracted, covering the ship like a coat of paint.

  Oh, no, thought Philippe.

  The Cyclopes ship was in sunlight, so everyone in the tactical room could see when its humid atmosphere began to vent into space. The crew must have been desperately trying to seal off sections of the ship, for the white atmosphere came out in bursts—some vapor would vent, and then there would be a pause, and then more venting. Philippe watched in horror as the dark mist lifted off the dead ship, which floated aimlessly until the defense station’s secondary guns cut it into ribbons.

  “Greetings,” said a flat-yet-familiar voice behind him. Simultaneously, his earplant repeated the same word.

  Philippe turned. It was, of course, the Magic Man.

  “Display no hostility toward this person, he is one of our friends who is divinely ordained to assist us in our time of need,” Max told the room.

  He is a monster, thought Philippe.

  He knew that the thought was unfair, but he was looking at a creature out of a nightmare. At the moment, the Magic Man was only about a meter tall and about as wide. Presumably in order to speak to both species, he had taken on the shape of a human head and torso and roughly half a Host body stuck together.

  “Hey, there,” said Shanti. “You came to help us!”

  “No,” replied the head of a beloved senior political figure. “I came to help those of the body who have been attacked by those also of the body.”

  “You mean the Hosts,” said Philippe. “You’re here to help the Hosts.”

  “They are of the body,” replied the Magic Man.

  “We’re helping them, too, but I gotta admit, you’re way better at it than we are,” said Shanti. She pointed to one of the screens, which displayed the long, tubular body that had emerged from the portal. “Is that all you, like, you personally?”

  “Yes,” said the Magic Man’s human head. The alien’s Host half began to chirp. “I have arrived among you to obtain advice regarding how best to eliminate this threat,” said Philippe’s earplant.

  “You are following your destiny, and we commend you,” said Max. “We must prevent the portal from closing again. We believe that the new engine technology on the Cyclopes ships closes the portal, and it is extremely important that they not be used. If you would be willing to disable those engines, it would be a great help to us.”

  “Why is a priest—?” George began, but Philippe shushed him. He was actually wondering the same thing, but the room was filled with Host soldiers. If none of them was objecting to Max taking leadership of a military operation, Philippe certainly wasn’t going to.

  “I am willing,” said the Magic Man.

  On the wall screens, the long, iridescent tube suddenly sped off. Some Host technician switched to a wider view of the battle, showing the Host ships and Cyclopes vessels trading fire. The tube passed through the scene like a comet, its end dissolving off until the entire thing turned into a dark vapor that settled onto the Cyclopes ships.

  “What are you doing?” asked Philippe, trying to keep the apprehension out of his voice.

  “I am eliminating those responsible for operating the new technology,” said the Magic Man.

  Philippe stood, feeling like a dead man.

  “What did he say?” asked Max.

  Philippe looked at him blankly for a moment.

  “He spoke to you in your language,” said the Host, apologetically. “He does not wear translation gear, and this portable translation device can translate directly only from Host speech, not human speech. I do not wish to inconvenience you with my questions, but—”

  “He is killing the Cyclopes who run the engines,” said Philippe.

  Max looked at the Magic Man, disbelieving.

  “Is his translation accurate?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said the Magic Man.

  Max stood for a moment. “You are killing the engine crews?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “On every Cyclopes ship?”

  “Yes.”

  Max flinched. “Why did you choose not to disable the engines themselves?” he asked.

  “I am unfamiliar with the engine technology, and it would take time to determine how to disable the engines,” said the Magic Man. “I am already familiar with the bodily operations of the Cyclopes, thus it is more efficient to eliminate them.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment.

  “What if they bring in new crews?” asked Shanti.

  “For the short term, I will maintain a lethal presence in the area where the engines are located,” said the Magic Man, with both heads.

  Philippe turned to Max. “You have to talk with the Cyclopes, you have to tell them to keep their people out of their engine rooms.”

  “I agree,” said Max, turning to a soldier. “Establish contact with the Cyclopes liaisons.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Shanti, stepping over to the priest. “Now’s the time to negotiate and get a ceas
e-fire, too. You let them know that we’ve got them by the short—that we’ve really got the advantage now.”

  “Tell them to stay out of the engine rooms, or they’re going to die,” said Philippe.

  “That is an unnecessary effort,” said the Magic Man’s human head. “A part of the body may not attack another part of the body.”

  The humans were silent again, while Max hovered over a Host soldier in blissful ignorance.

  “Or what?” asked Philippe. “What happens?”

  “The corrupted sub-body is eliminated,” said the Magic Man.

  “Hosts, I comprehend that you have not lost your aptitude for poisoning,” said Philippe’s earplant.

  He turned to see who was talking. One of the screens showed Endless Courage and Brave Loyalty standing together in a room.

  “It wasn’t them,” said Philippe. “You’re in a lot more trouble than you realize.”

  “That is an emphatically nonsensical comment, made solely in an attempt to deceive,” said Endless Courage. “This time, our ships are to fulfill our expectations and not turn back. All you have done is behave in a manner that is very emphatically shameful, and to ensure that our behavior will be very emphatically without shame.”

  “The remaining people on your ships could be killed,” said Max. “The portal is reopened. Our friends can help us now, and with their help, we will overpower your forces.”

  “More Cyclopes ships shall follow, and more,” said Endless Courage. “Shame shall be eradicated.”

  “So says our leadership,” said Brave Loyalty. “And none may question their lack of shame.”

  Philippe turned to the Magic Man, who had already grown a third appendage that presumably enabled him to hear and speak the Cyclopes language, although it didn’t really look familiar.

  “Tell them,” Philippe said. “Tell everyone, tell all of us, in every language. Tell us all what you are going to do because the Cyclopes attacked the Hosts.”

  “I will eliminate the corrupted sub-body,” said the Magic Man’s three appendages.

  “What does that mean?” Philippe asked. “Are you going to kill all the Cyclopes on the ships here, even if they surrender?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then are you going to stop killing Cyclopes?”

  “No.”

  “Where will you kill them next?”

  “I will return through the portal and eliminate the members of the corrupted sub-body on the station,” said the Magic Man. “Then I will go through the portal that leads to the planet of the Cyclopes and will eliminate them there. Then I will seek out secondary colonies or other ships in that region of space and will eliminate them there. That should eliminate the great majority of that sub-body. If at a later time I find other members of that sub-body elsewhere I will eliminate them at that time.”

  “Because you believe that the entire sub-body—and by that, you mean every individual Cyclops, regardless of age or occupation—is corrupted and must be eliminated,” said Philippe.

  “Yes.”

  Aside from the underlying noise of the station, the tactical room was silent. Max had an expression on his face that Philippe had never seen on a Host before. Max is terrified, he realized.

  “That assumption is faulty.” It was George.

  “You are not of the body,” said the Magic Man.

  “Nonetheless, I attempted to protect you,” said Philippe. “He and I are of the same body, and I think you should listen to him.”

  “An entire sub-body doesn’t have to be corrupt for the whole thing to act wrong,” said George. “In our bodies, a diseased organ can act in a way that is harmful to the health of the overall body. But that doesn’t mean you eliminate the entire organ—that won’t help the larger body either. Instead, you eliminate the disease. Once you do that, the organ will return to its normal function, and the body is much healthier.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Philippe. “You keep talking about the body, but you’re thinking about your body. All the parts of your body are basically the same, aren’t they? They follow a single will. But with our bodies and the Hosts’ bodies and the Cyclopes’ bodies, the parts are different. The members of the Cyclopes sub-body are different, too—they’re individuals, and they each have their own will. They just aren’t always free to express it.”

  “That is nonsensical,” said the Magic Man.

  “Other people are mysterious,” said Max, looking at the Magic Man with apprehension and revulsion.

  “They are not so mysterious to your people that your people chose not to combine them into a single body,” replied the Magic Man.

  “But that body is different from your body, correct?” said George. “It behaves differently. You have a body, and it is part of a larger body—but that body doesn’t follow the same rules as your own sub-body. In other species, that principle also works the other way. The Cyclopes are a sub-body, but within that sub-body are other, smaller sub-bodies, and they don’t all follow the same will.”

  “Why then do these other sub-bodies not make their will known?” asked the Magic Man.

  “Disease,” said George.

  “Dictatorship,” said Philippe.

  “The bad guys won’t let ’em,” said Shanti.

  An idea came to Philippe in an instant, fully formed.

  “I’ll prove it to you,” he said to the Magic Man. “We’ll prove it to you.”

  He turned to the screen, alive with hope. “Brave Loyalty, you once said to me that you thought the Cyclops who attacked me acted despicably. We now believe that that Cyclops was acting on orders from your leadership in order to help your people prepare for this attack. Tell me what you honestly think of those orders and that leadership.”

  Endless Courage made a whining sound, and shuddered, looking at Brave Loyalty. The second Cyclops stood absolutely still.

  “Come on,” said Philippe. “Tell me.”

  “Speak of your very emphatic loyalty,” said Endless Courage, pacing away from the screen.

  “You think that it was all shameful, don’t you?” asked Philippe.

  Brave Loyalty stared at the monitor, inscrutable.

  “Come on. It’s OK,” said Philippe, begging now. “Come on and say it.”

  Finally, Brave Loyalty spoke.

  “Human diplomat,” he said, “if I answer your question with honesty, tell me what the result will be?”

  “Your people will live,” said George.

  “All of them? My leaders?” the Cyclops replied. “I perceive what you wish to accomplish and the role you wish for me to play, and it would be very emphatically shameful. You wish for me to arrange to have my leaders assassinated by that freakish creature. And who would the new leader of the Cyclopes be, if not that same abomination? You wish for me to betray my entire planet and place it under the leadership of that hideous entity in order to prevent my own death.”

  “You would be saving your entire species from a threat your leaders brought down upon you,” said Philippe.

  Brave Loyalty twisted his arms in a gesture designed to convey—anger? defiance? resignation? sadness? “Who has the greater shame?” he asked. “The leader who acts shamefully, or the Cyclops who betrays that leader?”

  “You can’t be serious, you can’t be!” Philippe realized that he was yelling, that he had completely lost control, but he didn’t care. “He’ll kill you all! What’s wrong with you? Don’t you understand that? Don’t you care?”

  “Death is unavoidable. Death creates life. Shame is not and does not,” said Brave Loyalty. “I have served without shame and operated within the fields my entire life, and if I am to die, I will do so in the same manner and within the fields. If I am to die, that is as it is. The betrayal you seek shall not come from me.”

  When the bolt hit him, the humans gasped and a Host shrieked, but Brave Loyalty made no noise. His body convulsed under the constant pummeling of the electrical discharge.

  It let up for a moment, and he took a few
steps away from the screen—he has to die running, thought Philippe. Another bolt of white electricity hit him. Brave Loyalty staggered for a moment; his legs gave way and his gray body slowly collapsed. He fell below the monitor’s field of vision.

  Endless Courage stepped in front the screen. He moved slowly and staggered slightly. He looked drained.

  “Magic Man, the humans are right,” he said. “Some of the Cyclopes are poison. I believe that this attack on the Hosts was a very emphatically shameful action, and I opposed it, but I was unable to express my will because those who are corrupt had superior strength. Seeing your emphatically superior strength, I have executed this one to demonstrate the sincerity of my desire to purge our people of shamefulness. Please help me eliminate the emphatically shameful corruption from our body.”

  “The fuck?” said Shanti.

  Philippe shushed her.

  Everyone was still for a moment.

  “I accept your theory,” said a flat voice in Union English.

  And the Magic Man melted away.

  At first, they went back among the cargo containers.

  “Why are we—? We can’t keep this a fucking secret,” Shanti muttered, so they walked out onto the deck of the merchant’s ship again.

  George let out a small, slightly hysterical laugh. “All that, and we never got to see the planet!” he exclaimed.

  They watched in silence as the Cyclopes ships passed through the portal. One by one, they were swallowed by the void.

  “Does anyone know where they’re going?” asked George, after the last one vanished.

  “Wherever the Magic Man fucking tells them to,” Shanti replied in a dead voice.

  “Probably back to their home planet,” said Philippe.

  “Probably.”

  “Yeah, he has to kill off their leadership,” said George. He laughed again, a little more hysterically this time, and put his hands to his head.

  “Fuck!” he yelled, making Shanti and Philippe jump.

  They all started to laugh, shakily. It quickly stopped, but something, some part of the tension, had been released.

  “Yeah,” said Shanti. “He’s a hell of a guy, and he’s got a hell of a second.” She put her hands to her head, too, and then dropped them, as though too spent to even attempt to ease the pain.

  She turned to Philippe, looking at him like a child. “Philippe, what the fuck is going to happen? You all saw what I did, right? Endless Courage, like, totally fucking fried his buddy to save his own ass. He’s a lying asshole.”

  Philippe shrugged his shoulders. He was spent—too spent to play the good dad, too spent to come up with some soothing half-truth that would put everyone at ease.

  “And now, with his help, the Magic Man is going to wipe out the Cyclopes’ leadership,” Shanti continued. “God only knows how many people that’s going to be. But I’m sure Endless Courage will be sitting pretty at the end of it—the Magic Man’s right-hand man, ready to take over. Christ! What a fucking asshole!”

  “It’s terrible, yeah,” Philippe said. “But, honestly, sometimes the assholes are your best bet. Their self-interest makes them pragmatic.”

  They fell silent. They were all just too wiped out, too tired.

  We just want to go home, Philippe thought.

  Their ship began moving toward the portal, which had been hurriedly marked out by the barest clutch of lights. I wonder how long it will take the Hosts to rebuild? thought Philippe.

  Despite his fatigue, he realized that his question applied to more than just the wreath of lights. A prophecy that had given structure and meaning to the Hosts’ lives for the past 850 years had just been fulfilled. What were they going to do now?

  They moved closer to the lights, and Philippe’s anxiety over the future was suddenly replaced by a gripping fear that the portal would not work, that he would never see home again—not the station, not Titan, not Earth.

  He tried to calm himself. The portal had to work this time. It had just worked, for an entire fleet of Cyclopes ships. And the Magic Man had promised to destroy the faster-than-light technology (the technology itself, Max and Philippe had ascertained, not necessarily the people who made it), so the portal couldn’t shut down again, right? Right?

  Philippe thought about his previous trips through the portal. The problem was that the successful trips through the portal hadn’t really differed from when they couldn’t go through. He wouldn’t know if the portal was working or not because there hadn’t really been anything that stood out about the non-journey, aside from the result.

  Which was weird, right?

  “Hey, Shanti,” he said. She and the doctor had wandered up to the front end of the ship, some distance ahead of Philippe. She turned around to face him. “Why is it that, when you see a ship go through a portal, it disappears bit by bit—you know first the front end and then the back end—but when you’re actually on the ship, even if you’re in the back, it’s not like the front end vanishes or anything—it all looks normal? Is it because you’re closer to the portal or something?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Shanti replied.

  Well, that was predictable, Philippe thought.

  They were almost at the portal now. Philippe decided to watch carefully, in hopes that he could see something, anything, that would indicate that they were actually going through. He focused directly at the front of the ship, which was just about to pass through the area marked by the lights.

  At first he saw nothing, but then he saw a small, shimmering oval forming between where he was standing and where Shanti and George were. It appeared to be about waist high. Philippe blinked, but it was still there.

  Am I the first to see this? he wondered.

  The oval got rapidly bigger. Then two shimmering spots appeared below it, and a moment later, the three spots grew and connected. The single large spot began to shrink, and then to grow.

  Philippe started: It was coming at him.

  Philippe took a step back. “Magic Man?” he asked, alarmed. “Hello?”

  It came faster. He backpedaled some more, but it was gaining on him, getting bigger and smaller and bigger again. How close are the crates behind me? he thought. Am I trapped?

  He saw someone come from his right, fast. Shanti hit him, yanking him off his feet.

  But she was too late. Something hit them just as he was being knocked aside.

  Something.

  Some thing.

  Some nothing.

  It only lasted an instant. There was nothing to see or feel or hear or taste or smell.

  But like a moment’s glance from a loved one, the instant contained multitudes:

  There was a calculation of angles and speed, a determination of the force necessary to move a body of a particular size a certain minimum distance without causing injury to said body.

  Underneath that, there was a mission, something that defined and was not merely done: Protect.

  Underneath that, there was love.

  There was shock, discomfort, the pain and constriction of the body, the astonishment that there was a body to be pained and constricted.

  Underneath that, there was a lesson, learned the hard way, again and again: Do not dare to hope.

  Underneath that, there was hope.

  There was satisfaction, smug satisfaction, the sense of a plan finally completed, the pleasure of coming out on top.

  Underneath that, there was a desire: To be rid of the task once and for all, to tie off the annoying loose ends, to throw out the garbage and never think about it again.

  Underneath that was something that Philippe could never understand.

  Philippe and Shanti flew through the air and landed on the floor a couple of meters away, skidding along the smooth floor.

  “You don’t have the survival instincts God gave a fucking walrus. If it’s coming at you, go to the fucking side,” Shanti said, rolling off him. She was breathing hard and her voice was distracted—she was hectoring him
out of some sense of duty, but he could tell that her heart wasn’t in it.

  Philippe lay on his back, too shocked to answer.

  George suddenly loomed into his field of vision.

  “Wow!” he said, the old enthusiasm back in his voice. “That was cool!”

  “You saw that?” asked Shanti.

  “I saw a thread—no, a band—a band of, like, invisibility pass through you two,” George said, excitedly. “You froze for a second, and it went whoop.” He held up his index finger and passed it across his face, right to left.

  “You’re taking it well,” Shanti muttered.

  “It’s damned interesting!” George snapped the fingers of both hands and pointed at them both as they lay on the ground. He was beaming. “When we get back—medical examinations all around!”

  Philippe looked past George, through the clear roof of the spaceship, and realized that he was looking at the pure darkness that surrounded the diplomatic station. We made it through, he thought.

  Then he brought himself up to his elbows, and what he saw made him want to lie back down and close his eyes for the rest of his life.

  There was a Host standing where Philippe had just been. He was glancing around him jumpily, and he looked as alarmed as it was possible to look.

  He was no longer glowing, but he was decidedly golden in color, especially when compared to the other Hosts on the ship. The other Hosts stared at him, and after a long moment’s pause, they began thrumming.

  The noise startled him anew. He looked awfully confused and unhappy—as well as awfully familiar.

  It’s time to go back to work, thought Philippe. He smiled and waved from the floor.

  “Hello, Creepy,” he said, slowly moving to his feet.

  The Host messiah chirruped something in reply.

  Max was too far gone with rapture, so the humans had to find the portable translator and figure out how to turn it on themselves.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Philippe. “Are you OK?”

  “Do not allow them to take me through another portal,” said Creepy.

  “Did you guys hear that?” Shanti barked. “He doesn’t want to go through any more portals! God only knows what will happen to him if he does.”

  Creepy looked like he was ready to crawl out of his own skin. Philippe reached out and patted one of his legs, not sure if the Host would find the gesture calming or menacing. He wished for a moment that he could thrum.

  “I know that last trip was pretty rough,” he said. “You, um, you look healthy, at least.”

  Creepy stared at him for a moment. “Do I appear healthy?” he finally asked.

  Philippe looked over the Host. Creepy looked fine to him—especially for someone who was almost a millennium old and had spent most of that time disembodied. But, really, what do I know? Philippe wondered.

  “This man,” he said, pointing to George, “is a physician. Let’s hear what he thinks.”

  George shrugged. “Can you walk?” he asked the Host.

  Creepy slowly walked around in a small circle. He came to a stop and looked up. “I can walk,” he said, astonished. “I can indeed walk. Despite the long period of being incorporeal and unable to walk, I can walk now as well as I walked in the past.”

  He suddenly pulled his body up and stood on his two back legs, then lowered himself and stood on his two front legs, and then settled back down onto all six. He looked delighted.

  “So, it looks like you’ve got good strength and balance,” said George. “I’m a little concerned about your color, though—I’ve never seen a yellow Host before.”

  “That is unexpected because I am of an ordinary color.” said Creepy. He looked at the thrumming Hosts. “They are unusually red in color.”

  The Hosts looked at each other, and then looked at Max.

  The priest shuffled forward, awed. “We color ourselves, all Hosts do,” he said. “We consume a chemical compound on a daily basis that makes us red.”

  “Why?” asked Creepy, baffled.

  “So that we would look different than you, our messiah, and we would be able to identify you instantly were you to return to us,” said Max.

  Creepy looked appalled.

  “This is terrible,” he said.

  “He’s not very religious,” Philippe said to Shanti and George.

  Shanti walked over to Creepy. “So they gave you back,” she said, smiling.

  “They were done with me,” said Creepy, looking happy to see her.

  “Who returned you to us? Whom should we thank for this?” Max asked.

  Creepy looked askance at Max.

  “They don’t know about the other aliens,” Philippe explained. “The other Hosts don’t know.”

  “There is a kind of people,” Creepy said to Max. “They are the creators of the portals, and they are the ones who took me and held me.”

  Max gaped at Creepy in wonder. “Were they the reason you were able to sing such a marvelous prophecy?” he asked, excited.

  Creepy looked slightly ashamed. “These people witness time differently than people such as ourselves,” he said. “They apprehended a crisis as well as a means to offset that crisis. They led me to believe that this crisis would destroy our people, although I am no longer certain that they were genuinely concerned about our people.”

  Philippe started. He felt the same thing I did, he thought. Indifference. Not benevolence. Solipsism. He looked at Shanti. She was nodding—she had felt it, too.

  There had been something familiar about that brief glimpse into the minds of those aliens, and Philippe suddenly realized what it was. They had reminded him of Wouter Hoopen, the self-serving manager of the Titan station.

  Max, however, was radiant. “They saved our world,” he said, with the assurance of a true believer. “Through you, they provided our people with centuries of guidance that protected us from an unprovoked attack.”

  Creepy looked like he wished that he could vanish again.

  “We, uh, we don’t think that’s exactly what they were after,” Shanti jumped in. “When I was under hypnosis, this Host and I—we were very close, in our minds. We were able to really pool our knowledge of physics.”

  “You know about physics?” Philippe asked.

  “I minored in physics in college. And I read,” she replied, annoyed.

  Philippe successfully quashed any expression of surprise.

  “Anyway, that’s how we were able to figure out how to reopen the portal,” Shanti continued. “We don’t think that the aliens who took Creepy live here, you know, in our three physical dimensions. But they use them to—well, kind of as a dump, that’s our best theory, anyway. When they make the portals, it helps kind of clean things up where they live.

  “The crisis was those Cyclopes engines. Those are . . . I guess dirty’s the word. They make portals, but their portals are different from the other kind—they make, you know, dirty energy. Plus they unmake the good kind of portals, so all the trash that got cleaned up before is now right back in these aliens’ yard, along with all this new junk. So what I think is that to prevent that engine from being put into widespread use, those aliens grabbed our guy here and, um, did what they did.”

  “That seems kind of selfish,” said George.

  “These people preserved our planet from invasion and conquest,” said Max.

  George managed to get out, “You wouldn’t have been invaded if you hadn’t built that station,” before he spotted Philippe’s gesticulations. He quickly covered with, “But what do I know? I’m not an 850-year-old alien messiah.”

  “It sounds better to be one than it is to be one,” said Creepy.

  “They provided us with our unique destiny,” Max said to George, obviously not willing to let it go.

  “It doesn’t matter what they wanted,” said Shanti. “They’re done with us now.”

  Philippe walked into his office and collapsed into his chair.

  There was never an end to negotiati
on.

  First, they had reached the station, which had proven another shock to Creepy—he had thought that it would be more along the lines of an artificial planet, and it took some explaining for him to understand that they all lived inside it, not on the surface.

  Then, Creepy had nearly had a panic attack when he attempted to breathe the station’s atmosphere. It turned out that Hosts who went on the station for the first time underwent a lengthy acclimation process, but since Creepy was, after all, the messiah, none of the Hosts had thought it would be necessary for him.

  They were wrong, so for now, he was staying on the merchant’s ship. The Hosts had already decided to convert an entire unoccupied living spike into a home just for their messiah. It would no doubt feature the sweetest air available, siphoned directly off the cleanest mountaintops the Host planet could provide.

  After hearing the Hosts discussing their plans, Philippe had spoken with Creepy for a moment. The Host messiah’s first official request was that three-quarters of his living area be set aside as additional housing for the Snake Boys. Creepy’s generosity was celebrated by the Hosts and taken as further evidence of his holiness, which annoyed him. But, he had told Philippe, at least the number of people on the station who thought he was their savior numbered in the dozens, not in the billions.

  The Magic Man had not been seen on the station since the portal to the Host world had closed. But Stern Duty and three other Cyclopes on the station had fallen over dead shortly after the Cyclopes armada had passed through the portal leading to their home planet, so Philippe knew that part of the mysterious alien was still among them.

  Their deaths and the closing and reopening of the Host portal had alerted everyone on the station to the fact that something very big had happened. The Swimmers were preparing a broadcast on the attack and the Magic Man’s effective conquest of the Cyclopes planet, and Philippe knew that the days ahead would be filled with debate and more than a little panic.

  And that wasn’t even considering the response of Earth.

  Philippe leaned over his desk, sighing. Shanti was giving some sort of briefing to the SFers—a briefing that he was not privy to—so he was left alone in his office to dismally contemplate events.

  God only knew how the Union was going to react. Philippe wondered if they would all be pulled out, or if only he would be, or he and Shanti and George. Then he wondered if any of them would be allowed to set foot on Earth again, or if the best that he could hope for was an orbiting isolation pod next to Arne’s.

  Philippe slowly wrapped his arms around himself.

  There were things to feel good about, he reminded himself. They had pretty much saved the Hosts from invasion and the Cyclopes from extinction. And Shanti apparently knew more about the portals than the best physicists on Earth.

  Those were the things he was really going to have to emphasize in his report if he didn’t want a major Earth freak-out on his hands. Philippe leaned forward, looking at the blank scroll on his desk.

  He sighed. Not one, but two alien invasions—was there anything that he could write about that that would prevent the Union brass from panicking?

  Talk about an impossible task. . . .

  Someone knocked on his door and opened it. It was Bubba. “Visitor,” he said, and walked off.

  Philippe looked at the empty doorway, puzzled, until a movement on the ceiling drew his attention. Another White Spider.

  He turned back to his report. Where to begin? Obviously, he would have to say that they had traveled to the Hosts’ planet—he, Shanti, and George had agreed on that. They had to tell the Union about their unauthorized mission; they couldn’t pretend that they had merely heard about what had happened secondhand.

  But it wouldn’t be very politic to start the report with, “I was possessed by an alien, so I broke a bunch of rules.”

  Philippe stared at the scrolls on his desk, unable to open even one to begin his report.

  Was there any way? He sat back in his chair and rubbed his face with his hands. Suddenly grief overcame him. His body was racked by silent sobs.

  So many had died. Again. Brave Loyalty had been murdered in front of him. And as odd—as alien—as the Cyclops had been, Philippe knew in his heart that a good man had been brutally assassinated.

  Others might disagree, but Philippe had a gut feeling. Brave Loyalty might have been hard to understand, he might have been misled, but he had been good, a good, decent person who didn’t deserve to die the way he did.

  What had he said to Philippe just before he left the station? He had said that he wanted to keep the Cyclopes focused on the Cyclopes. At the time, it had sounded like an insult, but now Philippe knew better: Brave Loyalty had wanted the Cyclopes not to attack the Hosts. He wanted them to focus on themselves, not to direct their energies at one-upping the other species.

  He had failed, and he had paid with his life. Many, many other Cyclopes would die, too, Philippe was sure of it—the Magic Man might contain his slaughter, but it would be a slaughter nonetheless. As always, the innocent would die along with the guilty.

  Philippe wiped his eyes.

  Was this what the future held? Death and murder, destruction without end? Would Philippe have to stand by and watch it happen all over again, helpless again? Would the Union call him back, deciding that Brave Loyalty was right, that entanglements with aliens were too fraught with risk, that there was no upside to reaching out, that humans should stay safe and snug at home?

  And if they did that, could Philippe honestly say they were wrong?

  Could he answer the basic question, What are we doing here?

  A plunk interrupted his thoughts. Philippe looked up and realized that the White Spider had dropped onto his desk.

  This one’s more inquisitive than the others, he thought.

  He wiped his face and smiled at the alien.

  “Hello there!” he said, waving.

  The White Spider raised a foreleg and carefully repeated Philippe’s gesture, wiping the front of his body and then rotating the front end of his right foreleg in Philippe’s direction.

  “I bring from my people a loving welcome to this station, human diplomat,” the strange, white creature said. “We would be happy to call your people friends.”

  THE END

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